From Durham to San Francisco and back again – a serial entrepreneur has returned to his hometown for a new startup, and is raising cash in anticipation of a fall launch.
Meet George Kirkland, a graduate of both Durham Academy and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – who is back home with a message for the industry.
“Great tech companies can get access to capital outside of San Francisco and can be just as successful in North Carolina, hiring the same level of talent,” he said. “I want to show that that’s possible here because a lot of people feel like they have to leave North Carolina to have a venture-backed startup, but that’s not the case.”
Kirkland first left his home state for a career in banking, spending five years with Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) before heading to California where he started San Francisco-based ed-tech firm RaiseMe in 2012.
Eight years later, the world suddenly got very scary.
Kirkland, still at RaiseMe, was working from home in early 2020 when he got a text that would change his trajectory. His kids’ school was shifting to remote learning because of the pandemic. Suddenly, the 1,500-square-foot apartment he shared with his wife and two kids seemed very small.
That was a Wednesday. The following Friday, the family boarded a red-eye flight to his hometown of Durham.
“We were just going to come and ride out the pandemic, be close to friends and family,” Kirkland said. But the case counts kept rising. And suddenly, working from home became the new trend – and it wasn’t going anywhere.
And when RaiseMe, a firm trying to re-invent financial aid for college students, was bought out by CampusLogic in July of 2020, the move became permanent – so permanent that when the idea for his next startup hit, he committed to launching it in Durham.
And the idea for the startup, called HomeCloud, came out of the move.
“Moving into my first home after living in apartments for 15 years was what helped me come up with the idea of HomeCloud,” he said.
The company is in stealth mode ahead of a planned November launch. Kirkland declined to be specific about the product or the go-to-market strategy. But it’s about “rethinking part of the home-buying process, effectively creating the ability for people buying a home to digitize all of that home’s information.”
He envisions a home portal of sorts that will allow a homeowner to manage all aspects of the home, from maintenance to repairs.
Right now, it’s just Kirkland working with a handful of remote contractors. When the product launches, he expects to hire full-time team members, growing to between 10 and 15 employees in the next year.
With proceeds of his latest exit, Kirkland doesn’t have to rely on a paycheck, so he can create a lean operation, he said.
But it still requires capital, which is why he approached friends and angel investors for the firm’s first round of funding. A securities disclosure shows the firm has closed on $400,000 in debt from six investors. The round is capped at $500,000, and Kirkland said he’s confident he’ll close the full amount. In the meantime, he’s hunkering down, getting ready for a big November launch – and singing Durham’s praises, particularly its lower cost of living, to his contacts out west.